Martin Amis

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A Black Comedy of Manners

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SOURCE: "Discussions of Recent Books: A Black Comedy of Manners," in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 72, No. 3, Summer, 1996, pp. 561-64.

[In the following negative review, Ward faults The Information, saying it "does not have a plot, it has predicaments and events." He also declares that "none of the characters in The Information comes close to being sympathetic."]

On its publication Martin Amis's The Information threatened to be avalanched by the various English literary and celebrity controversies of which its author was the lightning rod. Amis having his teeth fixed; Amis changing his agent thereby losing his friendship with author Julian Barnes who is the husband of Amis's now ex-agent; Amis hiring an American agent (nicknamed "The Jackal"!) and getting too much money for his next book(s); Amis divorcing; Amis generally getting too big for his britches; etc., etc. All this extra-literary brouhaha, which brawled over into the always decorous British tabloids, actually helped make people feel comfortable. It facilitated slotting The Information into easy categories: it was an expression of the author's "mid-life crisis" or a wicked literary roman a clef or Amis had "gone American." Since the subjects that Amis remorselessly anatomizes are so painful, displacement could be achieved by reducing literature to autobiography: "Boy, his teeth must have really hurt when he wrote this bit!"

But when A.S. Byatt castigated Amis for being money hungry, it is likely that her subtext, conscious or not, was her awareness that Amis was dynamiting not just the supposed gentility of the literary life but the very possibility of thought (including novels) and action. Byatt's Possession, after all, was a self-conscious homage to the novel, relying on a shared community of readers who could decode her lovingly recreated literary styles, solve the "puzzles," and resolve the narrative. Richard Tull, The Information's main character, has written a novel, Untitled, which not only has no audience but which physically strikes down those who do attempt it with bizarre and paralyzing medical conditions! No one gets past page nine without going to hospital. So the news from The Information is much worse and therefore much better: Amis has written a perfectly pitched expression of our late 20th-century dystopia.

Although it takes place during the 40th year of its two protagonists, The Information does not have a plot, it has predicaments and events. The narrative drive is provided by Amis's coruscating style, and no one is better than he at eviscerating modern life. In British law, the "information" is the bill of particulars, the charge, the indictment and Amis indicts. Richard Tull and Gwynn Barry are writers. After a promising start, Tull is unsuccessful, eking out a living with literary odd jobs—reviewing, working at a vanity press, and a little magazine whose name is The Little Magazine—while writing and not publishing novels. Gwynn Barry, Tull's college chum, started out untalented, unsuccessful, and through some kind of cosmic accident has become not only fantastically best selling but critically well-received. His writes soppy novels about a utopian community or commune—Amelior (from amelioration)—whose optimistic perfectability is counterpoint to society's increasing awfulness and presumably the reason for their international popularity. Barry is married to a minor royal, short-listed for the "Profundity Requital," a fabulously endowed new literary prize, and gives interviews in which he discusses his writing's relationship to carpentry.

At its basic level The Information is a black comedy of literary manners (anyone who reviews books has to cringe at the progression of slab-like lives that Tull grinds through: Love in a Maze: A Life of James Shirley or The Soul's Dark Cottage: A Life of Edmund Waller) and literary jealousy. There is a fabulously rendered American book tour which no one who hopes ever to give a reading should read. Inevitably, Barry's success drives Tull wild and he concocts various plots of escalating violence against his rival. None of them work, most of them backfire, and just when you think things can't get any worse, they do. In farce, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim for example, the denouement is a boulversement which sets things right so that every one goes home happy; Jim does turn out, against the odds, to indeed be lucky. Here, Martin Amis sets things even more horribly wrong. Tull gets a final stamp to his cliff-hanging fingernails. Barry is revealed as not quite the benignly self-satisfied chump he appears to be. His shredding of Tull's illusions and hopes is shattering both to Tull and—however unlikable Tull is—the reader. The failure of Tull's escalating plots is skeined around by Amis's larger purpose to show the breakdown not just of a friendship but of all connection, including cause and effect. When Tull hires the autodidactic hard-man Steve Cousins (who is Richard's only reader and fan!) to beat up Barry things go haywire and Tull himself gets thumped by the confused thugs. Inevitably, Tull is impotent, promiscuously impotent.

"The Knowledge" is London cabbie slang for the ability, a prerequisite for a hack license, to find any address in the city by a route from any other address in the city. "The Knowledge" is learned by tireless application, the aspirant cab driver tracing city streets so that the pattern becomes wholly known and comprehended to the point of being synaptically imprinted. In this process, "The Knowledge" is reified, becomes a noun. The chaotic and bewildering arrangement of streets is ordered through an act of reason. "The Knowledge," then, is a paradigm of an almost 18th-century rationalism: a subject which is wholly known and comprehended by cognitive (and physical) application. The cabbie is Diderot in a car mapping the world for the Encyclopedia, like early doctors tracing veins.

Amis only mentions "The Knowledge" in a quick passage but it is key as the antithesis of "The Information." Instead of a body of knowledge which can be known and mastered, "The Information" is something inflicted on and endured by helpless men. It is not the workings of the conscious, rational mind (the cabbie on his bike learning every mews) but of sub- or even unconsciousness: "And then there is the information, which is nothing, and comes at night." In the scientific field of Information Theory, information has nothing to do with communication, rather it is synonymous with entropy. About the only scene we hear of in Richard Tull's Untitled is of "five unreliable narrators conversing on crossed mobile phone lines while stuck in the same revolving door," a tour de force image of cacophonous, incoherent entropy. Or as Amis writes in a perfectly balanced sentence of blockage: "The five lanes going out of the city were all blocked and the five lanes coming into the city were all blocked." So much for the efficient, rational progress implicit in "The Knowledge."

For Amis's fiction the paradox is that the obverse of Enlightenment ("The Knowledge") is not just the deconstructions of post-modernism but paralysis and collapse. We've built the enlightened city on the hill, lived in it for a while, and are now sliding inexorably off its dark side in terror. As Goya famously captioned capricho #43: "The sleep of reason produces monsters." One of The Information's comic riffs showing irrationality triumphing over rationality is a driving school which teaches not just bad but anarchically irresponsible driving. Instead of following rules, the student is taught to "To impress your personality on the road." A not so comic riff is an anonymous driver who blasts at random intervals through Richard Tull's residential streets, scattering walkers and enraging him. In one of his bleaker poems, "The Life with the Hole in It," Philip Larkin defined life as "The unbeatable slow machine/Which brings what you'll get." Well, Amis says, here's unbeatable life and here's the hole: try and tell them apart. Instead of the possibility of mastery, one can only submit to the inexorable. The speeding car will show up again and run over someone, probably you.

Amis's London Fields covered the destruction of civil society. Now he surveys the wreckage of the individual. There are Amis's now-familiar turns about the decrepitude and betrayal of the body, especially the bodies of fortyish men. Tull's bodily ills chart the progress of his failures to the point that he develops a phobia that he constantly smells of shit. More than this—if that's possible!—is a larger breakdown of feeling. None of the characters in The Information comes close to being sympathetic. Tull's self-regarding relief at an ex-lover's suicide ices the page. Barely able to conceive of the existence of others, let alone feel for or link with them, the characters have no clue about their own lives, work or emotions. We never actually hear what either's novel is about because neither can talk about them! Barry is at least sensible enough to come up with the hackneyed analogy with carpentry to "explain" his books to his public. Poor Richard Tull, attempting to uphold high art, is reduced to gibbering that the book is about what it is about and if he could talk about it he wouldn't have written it! In the end, Barry survives because his accidental success strokes his narcissism and cast-iron ego. For Tull, overloaded, all circuits fried, the only response is incoherence and a battered whimpering. The "information" leads men (this is a novel from which women are excluded both as characters and—perhaps—as readers) to "cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams." Men cry at night "because they don't know how to do it when they're awake."

The only redemption in The Information comes from Tull's children, and its a peculiar kind of redemption. First, Amis cutely draws the twins Marco and Marius so they are irresistable. They are unconditional in their love, no matter what Tull does or thinks, and Tull is weepingly grateful. But Marco has a learning disability—blockage again—so he has to read his children's stories with Tull helping him spell them out letter by letter. The scene where Marco and Richard laboriously decode "And the good boy and the bad boy went into the forest" is affecting but the point is that language devolving into fragmented symbols makes meaning impossible. And that Tull gives up trying to help his boy before they get to the word "forest." "Only connect?" Not bloody likely.

Words cannot express Martin Amis's achievement in The Information. I hate him.

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